by Amy Jordan — With an interesting protagonist (a former detective in her 60s), The Dark Hours is a solid, well written and engrossing police procedural.
Tag: Irish
The Ballad of Mary Kearney
by Katherine Mezzacappa — The Ballad of Mary Kearney unfolds like a song, to tell a stirring tale of forbidden love, oppression and rebellion in 18th century Ireland.
The Wardrobe Department
by Elaine Garvey — The Wardrobe Department is a beautiful, quietly resonant read with emotional depth and atmospheric writing. Garvey is one to watch.
This is Not a Vampire Story
by Simon Doyle — In 1950, Victor is 17 and in love with a boy. Today, Victor is 17 and working in a care home, looking after the man he still loves.
Into the Storm
by Cecilia Ahern — A doctor, Enya Pickering, gets caught up in a hit and run incident on a remote road outside Dublin on a wet winter night.
The Women Behind the Door
by Roddy Doyle — An ex-alcoholic mother and a traumatised daughter during lockdown. Superb, understated writing.
When We Were Silent
by Fiona McPhillips — When We Were Silent is a raging, screaming #MeToo. It’s also very well written: well constructed and vivid, with strong characters and plot.
The Hunter
by Tana French — Another episode of American ex-cop Cal Hooper in rural Ireland. Intelligent, insightful and well written. French gets better all the time.
The Wren, The Wren
by Anne Enright — Not a narrative of grand events but an exploration of the intricate threads that bind couples and families.
Scenes of a Graphic Nature
by Caroline O’Donoghue — A clever, perceptive, well written and very readable novel about Ireland, history, lies and stories.
White City
by Kevin Power — Moving and well written story of family dysfunction, the corruption of wealth and a life shattered by a series of poor decisions.
Life Sentences
by Billy O’Callaghan — A long and unrelenting story of miserable poverty, hard work and bare survival. It’s miserable to read, too, despite often lyrical prose.
A Good Father
by Catherine Talbot — Des is a good father. He loves his wife and children more than anything. So much that he’s determined to take care of them, once and for all.
Love
by Roddy Doyle — Love between friends, between parents and children, between spouses. And that weird, unreliable, deceptive kind of love — being ‘in love’.
Snow
by John Banville — There’s a body in the library of the Big House, but nothing is quite as it appears in Snow, an atmospheric whodunnit set in post-war Ireland.
The Searcher
by Tana French — American ex-cop in the Irish countryside. Intelligent and well written, it debunks the tourist-brochure stereotypes. A cracking good read.
Where the Edge Is
by Grainne Murphy — a very readable and moving novel about people handling the intense emotional experience of a rescue operation.
No Simple Death
by Valerie Keogh — No Simple Death is a fairly standard police procedural, but it grabbed my attention from the first page and kept it to the last.
Holding
by Graham Norton — Tragedy and mystery in an Irish village. A strong plot, bursts of humour and interesting, well rounded characters.
The Gathering
by Anne Enright — Sublime novel about family, siblings, past trauma and grief, and how the bereaved struggle to make sense of their experience.